Redefining First World Standards

Apologies for the long absence.  I would love to say that I’ve been busy enjoying the start of summer in Perth, lounging alongside the Indian Ocean with some good books and a Little Creatures Light Ale or Pipsqueak Cider (or two) in hand but alas I’ve just been busy with work.  This morning my trip to the bank to place a wire transfer has definitely jumpstarted me back into posting though because I have found something else to add to my list of things that Qatar is better than Australia at doing:

1.        Reasonably priced food and services.  I’ve gone from $27 pedicures at the Four Seasons in Doha to refusing to pay $60+ for no name hole in the wall salons in Perth.  Forget $25 entrees at Spice Market and $7 dinners at Thai Snack in Qatar because in Perth, Chinese takeaway will set you back $15 a person (excluding rice, an extra $5 per serving).  Slightly nicer but still casual restaurants in Perth will set you back a minimum of $25 per person excluding drinks for average food.

2.        Internet.  I could go on about this all day but I’ll stick to the basics of set-up and service.  Not only did ridiculously slow to get anything done Qtel in Qatar beat Perth’s Telestra at setting up my internet (about one month versus almost seven weeks) but my internet speed was significantly faster in Qatar versus Australia which you would think would be a more developed country.  Not only that, but after seven months of service, I finally got a correct bill from Telestra.  I only had one incorrect bill in Qatar.

3.        Mobile service.  In Qatar, I could be out in the absolute middle of the desert and still have full service on my phone.  Ok, perhaps my cell phone didn’t work well in my house, but all those concrete walls must have blocked the signal.  In Australia, we lose cell phone coverage all of the time, even in populated areas.

4.        I saved the best for last: banking services.  Today I went to place a wire transfer from my Australian bank to my bank in the U.S.  I arrived at my bank and was told that they couldn’t do it, unless I could figure out how to use their website to do the wire, since all the bank can do is use the same website I use at home.  After realizing that an international wire would actually require the bank employees to do some work, they then told me it was impossible (despite the fact they advertise forex on tv/internet quite heavily).  The coup de grace was when they suggested I go to Western Union if I wanted to send money overseas.  New item on my to do list: ‘find new bank.’

Australia, you might be absolutely gorgeous but your service sucks.  You might want to rethink your ‘fair go’ philosophy because it may be responsible for contributing to such crappy businesses and service industry employees that you don’t even compare to less developed countries like Qatar, in all of their frustrating bureaucratic glory.  I can’t wait to see how your economy does when there is a pull back in natural resources prices.  You export your raw materials, and import nearly all value added products despite your massive tariffs.  Isn’t that what a third world country is supposed to do?

Convicts and Beer

H claims that I am going to get into a bar fight if I keep declaring Australia to be the land of convicts and kangaroos. I see this as nothing more than an entertaining declaration of truths. Australia was the recipient of British convicts who opted for life on a new continent in lieu of staying behind bars in their homeland. And despite not seeing a live one yet, Australia is most certainly the country of kangaroos. Where else can you find grocery store meat departments full of ‘roo meat, including “Kanga Banga” sausages, road laws detailing what to do if you hit a kangaroo (stop and check its pouch for a baby ‘roo and if there is one, wrap it in a blanket and bring it to the nearest vet), and statues everywhere depicting these adorable creatures? Kangaroos are even in the news with coverage ranging from what to do about the overpopulation problem to a kangaroo getting into a house and a man wrestling him out in nothing but his “Bondie” underwear.

Today we checked out some of WA’s convict history in Fremantle at Fremantle Prison, a limestone jail built in the 1850s and used as Perth’s maximum-security prison until 1991. We met one of our Japanese friends, K, there and took the Great Escapes tour which led us on an interesting tour of the prison during which time the guide told us some stories of a few of the most notable escapes and escape attempts from the prison. To read about some of them, visit the Fremantle Prison website. After the tour we walked around Fremantle, admiring its 19^th century mostly convict built architecture, and walked through some nice looking cheese, meat, and produce markets, and some tacky souvenir and handicraft markets.

As we walked around, we noticed multiple groups of people collecting money for Sea Shepherds, a whale conservation group that takes it upon itself to patrol a whale sanctuary in Antarctica from Japanese whaling vessels. There is a show that follows the group’s activities on Animal Planet , called Whale Wars, that H and I have enjoyed watching. Recently in the news, we heard that a Sea Shepherd member, Captain Pete Bethune, had been arrested for boarding a Japanese whaling vessel to serve a citizen’s arrest warrant to the captain for ramming and shipping his ship, the Ady Gil. He was transported back to Japan on that whaling vessel and is awaiting trial in a prison in Tokyo for a variety of charges. I suspected that the press coverage in Japan of the group was fairly intense and asked our friend K if he had heard anything about the group. He had and viewed the group as a terrorist organization, a representation that seems to be common in the Japanese press. K saw nothing wrong with collecting whale meat for research and using the remains as food, apparently he views whale meat as quite a delicacy. I disagreed saying that not only are whales endangered species, but they are so cute and so helpless. He asked me if I am a vegetarian and I said no but I don’t eat animals that I view as cute such as sheep, baby cows, rabbit, and whales. He had to concede that chickens and fish aren’t really cute so the argument went to me. The loser should have had to make a contribution to Sea Shepherds ;)

To end the day, we visited Little Creatures Brewery, located on the Indian Ocean in Fremantle, where we sampled some of their great food and tried out some more of their beers and their Pipsqueak Cider. The Pipsqueak Cider was quite good, I like it better than Strongbow, which was recommended by an Australian friend, but my favorite is still Savanna Dry, a South African cider that I discovered in Qatar.